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New anti-terror program for schools adds ‘radicalization’ to three Rs

Initiative exposes Canadian children to extremism as Ottawa bolsters fight against Islamic State’s online terrorist recruiters

The Extreme Dialogue video series focuses on Christianne Boudreau, whose son Damian Clairmont converted to Islam and died fighting in Syria last winter. Boudreau is active in the movement to prevent the radicalization of Muslim youth. (Bill Graveland / THE CANADIAN PRESS)

MONTREAL—A program aimed at immunizing school-aged children against the dangers of radicalization is being launched as Ottawa steps up its fight against the Islamic State’s web-savvy terrorist recruiters.

The Extreme Dialogue project aims to fight extremism on the web, a vast terrain that the Islamic State has occupied largely without challenge since it emerged a year ago. The initiative also provides an alternative narrative to the material that is being posted to Twitter, Facebook and other social media feeds by those working on the pro-ISIS Internet supply lines.

“They are providing a master class of what’s possible online, as much as I hate to admit it . . . They will use absolutely every tool at their disposal and their intended goal is to reach the hearts and minds of our young people whether to get them to fight or fundraise, or to be complicit and accept their ideas,” Rachel Briggs, the London-based program director of Extreme Dialogue, told the Star in an interview.

“As long as we as a society are silent on these issues, extremist voices are only growing louder.”

The web is already saturated with Islamic State propaganda, including death videos released in the last week that showed a captured Jordanian pilot being burned alive and 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians being beheaded in Libya. There are also endless citations from the Qur’an providing a religious justification for the violence and even an ebook circulating that instructs aspiring fighters about what to pack and how to act when leaving for Syria.

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In the face of this, the Canadian-funded project, one of several anti-terror initiatives paid for each year by the government, adopts a tried-and-true method. It has taken the example of the testimonial of the drunk driver or the victim of drunk driving from a generation of high-school assemblies and applied it to the modern-day terror threat.

The initial videos that are being released in Calgary in the company of members of the RCMP, Calgary Police and the Muslim community have been tested at an unnamed school in Ontario and shown to students, who were said to react positively. There have already been inquiries from school boards about showing them to students. Briggs said her group will be organizing training sessions with police, teachers and community workers to help them manage the often sensitive questions raised when talking about radicalization. There is no set date for when the videos might be shown to Toronto schoolchildren.

The video series, which received $332,500 in funding, focuses on the tears and unanswered questions of Calgary’s Christianne Boudreau after her 22-year-old son, Damian Clairmont, was killed last year fighting in Syria’s civil war. It also features the regrets and emotional scars of Daniel Gallant, a former white supremacist who bounced around between British Columbia and Alberta but is now based in Kamloops, B.C.

Gallant, who recounts instigating random fights up to nine times a day as a way to manage the rage of childhood abuse, said the power of the videos is in their ability to show the effects of an extremist lifestyle on families, friends and victims.

There are plenty of similarities between the far-right hate groups and those being radicalized by religion, but the most important, he said, is that both are an extreme reaction to an individual’s social isolation.

“In the past I had conscious thoughts in the forefront of my mind that all I needed was connection with people,” Gallant said. “That’s all I wanted and when I wasn’t able to attain that . . . that’s when my violence progressed. I remember sitting on the streets and having thoughts about that.”

Boudreau’s plight may be more familiar to Canadians because of her activism and media visibility in the year since she learned of Clairmont’s death. She has spoken of the need to prevent young, radicalized Canadians like her son from leaving the country and also set up a de-radicalization program to support those efforts.

Despite her professional exterior, it is still painful to watch her sob and sniffle when she asks her dead son how she is supposed to find peace knowing of the violence that filled the final days of his young life and waits for answers she knows will never come.

“What did all this have to do with God?” she asks in the video.

Other Canadian families are still struggling because of children who are currently in Syria or Iraq, or those who are trying to get there, Boudreau said. That hasn’t changed since last October’s storming of Parliament Hill or the hit-and-run that killed a Canadian soldier in the Quebec town of Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu. In the latter case, Martin Couture-Rouleau, the author of the terror attack, had had his passport revoked after trying to travel to Syria last summer.

“Kids are still leaving on a regular basis. I don’t think people want to admit it or realize it but it’s still happening. Even with all the knowledge that’s out there it’s still happening and we’re still being blindsided,” Boudreau said in an interview.

For now, Extreme Dialogue may just have a few videos going up against hundreds of compelling Islamic State productions, but it is a start, said Rachel Briggs. With a website, some YouTube videos and resources to educate young people, community leaders and school teachers about the process and effects of radicalization, the campaign has also received funding to adapted and expanded and into Britain, Germany and Hungary.

But even if the program does succeed in rapidly scaling up its efforts, it is still starting from behind. The hope, however, is that videos lead to a conversation that helps young people see through the universal lures and tricks employed by extremist recruiters.

“This is not going to pull somebody out of Al-Shabaab, it’s not going to drag somebody back from Syria,” said Briggs. “All of our efforts to regulate and take down content will not stop young people getting access to this material. We have to make sure they have the skills to see it for what it is and think about it for themselves.”

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